Cilka's Journey(101)
Nobel Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag’s most famous victim and its most dedicated chronicler, described Stalin’s system of forced labor camps as the Gulag Archipelago. The word is appropriate, as the camps spread across the Soviet Union’s eleven time zones like a string of interconnected islands. There were Gulags in Russia’s biggest cities, some housing German prisoners of war serving as slave laborers, and others where imprisoned engineers and scientists toiled in high-tech prison laboratories. But most Gulags were located in the remotest corners of the Siberian north and in the far east—indeed, whole swathes of the USSR were effectively colonized by State prisoners who built dozens of brand-new cities, roads, railways, dams and factories where there had previously been just bleak wasteland.
Vorkuta was such a colony, both in the sense of a penal settlement and a tiny island of life in a hostile, unexplored territory. In the late 1920s, Soviet geologists identified vast coal deposits in the frozen taiga wilderness, an area too cold for trees to grow, where the Pechora River flowed into the Arctic Sea. The region was some 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) north of Moscow and 160 kilometers (99 miles) above the Arctic Circle. Soviet secret police lost no time in arresting a leading Russian geologist, Nikolai Tikhonovich, and setting him to work organizing an expedition to sink the first mine in the area. In the early summer of 1931, a team of twenty-three men set off northward from Ukhta by boat. Prisoner-geologists led the way, ordinary prisoners manned the oars, and a small secret police contingent was in command. Paddling and marching through the swarms of insects that inhabit the tundra in summer months, the party built a makeshift camp. “The heart compressed at the sight of the wild, empty landscape,” recalled one of the prisoner-specialists, a geographer named Kulevsky. “The absurdly large, black, solitary watchtower, the two poor huts, the taiga and the mud.” The beleaguered group somehow survived their first winter, when temperatures often fell to forty degrees below zero and the sun did not rise above the horizon for the four-month-long polar night. In the spring of 1932, they sank the first mine at Vorkuta, using only picks and shovels and wooden carts.
Stalin’s Purges—the mass arrests of suspect Party members and of politically unreliable wealthy peasants—began in 1934 and provided the mass of slave labor needed to turn this desolate site into a major industrial center. By 1938, the new settlement contained 15,000 prisoners and had produced 188,206 tons of coal. Vorkuta had become the headquarters of Vorkutlag, a sprawling network of 132 separate labor camps that covered over 90,000 square kilometers—an area larger than Ireland. By 1946, when Cilka arrived, Vorkutlag housed 62,700 inmates and was known as one of the largest and toughest camps in the entire Gulag system. An estimated 2 million prisoners passed through Vorkuta’s camps between 1931 and 1957—an estimated 200,000 of them perished from disease, overwork, and malnourishment in the Arctic conditions.
By the 1940s, Vorkuta had been connected to the rest of Russia by a prisoner-built railway. There is still no road to Vorkuta, even today. A brand-new city had been built on the unstable permafrost—the deep-lying soil that never thaws, even in the height of summer. The city boasted a geological institute and a university, theaters, puppet theaters, swimming pools and nurseries. The guards and administrators lived lives of comparative luxury. “Life was better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union,” remembered Andrei Cheburkin, a foreman in the neighboring nickel-mining Gulag of Norilsk. “All the bosses had maids, prisoner maids. Then the food was amazing. There were all sorts of fish. You could go and catch it in the lakes. And if in the rest of the Union there were ration cards, here we lived virtually without cards. Meat. Butter. If you wanted champagne you had to take a crab as well, there were so many. Caviar … barrels of the stuff lay around.”
For the prisoners, however, the living conditions were shockingly different. Most lived in flimsy wooden barracks with unplastered walls, the cracks stopped up with mud. The inside space was filled with rows of knocked-together bunk beds, a few crude tables and benches, with a single sheet-metal stove. One photo of a women’s hut does show single beds, and embroidery strung around the hut, as in this narrative. In photographs of Vorkuta taken in the winter of 1945 the barracks are almost invisible—their steeply sloping roofs come almost to the ground so that the snow accumulating around them would insulate them from the bitter Arctic cold.
Almost all survivors speak of the “terrible heavy smell” that pervaded the barracks. Few Gulags had any kind of laundry facilities, so filthy and mildewed clothes would lie drying along the edges of the bunks, the tables and on every available surface. At night, prisoners used a parasha—a communal bucket—in place of a toilet. One pris oner wrote that in the morning the parasha was “impossible to carry, so it was dragged along across the slippery floor. The contents invariably spilled out.” The stench made it “almost impossible to breathe.”
In the center of most of Vorkutlag’s hundred-plus camps was a large open parade ground where the prisoners stood to attention twice a day to be counted. Nearby was a mess hall, where prisoners were fed a daily soup made of “spoiled cabbage and potatoes, sometimes with pieces of pig fat, sometimes with herring heads” or “fish or animal lungs and a few potatoes.” The convicts’ area was usually surrounded by double rings of barbed wire, patrolled by Alsatian guard dogs, and surrounded by guard towers. Beyond the wire were the guards’ barracks and administrators’ houses.